Various products are required to support many audio/speech interfaces in order to allow its user variety of connectivity options. Together with large amount of different audio/speech protocols, the outcome is the need to integrate, into the product, extensive number of components. In addition, the need to support legacy interfaces (e.g. analog) together with modern ones (e.g. digital), each with different characteristics (e.g. bandwidth), imposes the products' design to be flexible and scalable.
Therefore, there is growing need to provide a single point (chip) which will handle and route the audio subsystem.